An Jung-sik was the last official court painter of the Joseon period and has generally been regarded an artist who saw out the last years of Joseon painting while producing works commissioned by clients. This study considers regarding An as a modern artist, based on Yeonggwang punggyeong and Baegak chunhyo, two true-view landscape works he produced in 1915. Earlier, in 1881, An was sent by the Korean government to Tianjin as yeongseonsa, a type of envoy dispatched to learn about new forms of culture. He subsequently made trips to Shanghai in 1891 and 1899 and was active in Japan for approximately two years around 1900: as a result, he would have come into contact with new culture and art that was hard to find in Korea at the time. Since, however, most of An’s extant works are gimyeong jeoljido(a type of still life with dishes and cut flowers), doseok inmulhwa(paintings depicting immortals, Buddhas or eminent monks), noando(paintings of reeds and geese) or idealized landscapes, all of which are strongly auspicious in nature, it has been hard to find any trace of modern influence resulting from his encounters with new culture. This study investigates the extent to which Yeonggwang punggyeong and Baegak chunhyo, hitherto regarded without much interest as mere true-view landscapes, really belong in this category.
Until now, there has been no photograph of the area depicted in Yeonggwang punggyeong to compare with the painting, but an investigation of the actual location, Chehwajeong Pavilion, established that An painted the village as it appeared before him. He did not, however, paint this actual view using the kind of mechanical perspective offered by a camera; rather, the artist placed the house of the client who had commissioned the work in the center of his composition and surrounded it with other geographic features, out of consideration for the client. Meanwhile, Baegak chunhyo uses a one-point perspective technique to depict Gwanghwamun Gate, Gyeongbokgung Palace and Mt. Bugaksan as seen from Gwanghwamun Square. Though the way An shrinks the actual view to fit the major axis on his canvas is somewhat awkward, the realistic depiction of the scene is more specific than anything found in other contemporary works. This depiction probably used a photograph widely available at the time. While the visual accuracy of Baegak chunhyo is modern in character, the work can be interpreted as containing An’s regret at witnessing the ruin of Gyeongbokgung during the Japanese colonial period, and his desire to see it restored. It follows that Yeonggwang punggyeong and Baegak chunhyo show modernistic elements in that they realistically reproduce scenes observed directly by the artist, rather than containing idealized styles or auspicious meaning. Meanwhile, though it has so far been thought that Baegak chunhyo was commissioned by the Joseon royal family or the Japanese Government-General, this paper suggests the possibility that it was commissioned by a third person or produced by the personal choice of the artist as an expression of his sorrow at seeing Gyeongbokgung Palace fall into ruin.